


I See Your Face

by ariel2me



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-03 14:44:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15821022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariel2me/pseuds/ariel2me
Summary: Three women and their Baratheon husbands.Chapter 2: Three women, their Baratheon husbands, and the black-haired Baratheon babes they gave birth to.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to delete my AO3 account back in April (for various reasons I won’t get into), but changed my mind after a while. A number of fics from 2012 and 2013 were already deleted, however, and I’m going to repost some of them. This one was written in 2013, and it’s the first time I wrote about Argella. (I’ve written about Cassana and Selyse prior to this fic.) 
> 
> I’ve done some editing for clarity, but I haven’t changed anything major. The Argella section is no longer canon-compliant since the release of TWOIAF (Orys did not serve as Hand of the King for the entire duration of Aegon I‘s reign), and my headcanon about how the Cassana/Steffon wedding came about has changed quite a bit, but I will leave things as they were, as a record of what I was thinking back then, hehe.

**Argella Durrandon**

She hated him when he slew her father. But she hated him even more when he removed the chains that her cowardly, traitorous men had brutally forced on her; when he covered her bruised, battered, naked flesh with his cloak; when he offered her wine, the only thing besides water that had passed her throat in days.

She hated her relief, her enforced meekness, her gratitude.

 _Where is your pride, Argella?_ The Storm Queen who knelt to the Targaryen bastard. The whore who fucked and married her father’s slayer.

Her father had been full of pride. Argella wanted to live. She wanted her people to live. And she wanted Storm’s End, the only home she had ever known.

She had knelt, true, and she had married him. But she had never offered herself to him.

She did what she had to do, to protect herself, and to protect everything she held dear.

“You should be proud,” he told her. “Your sigil, your House words, I’ll not change that. They will be mine as well.” _I did that for you_ , was what he was implying.

 _No, you did that for yourself_. For a bastard without his own House and his own words and his own sigil. She smiled and told him, “I am most grateful.”

When he left to serve his dragon king, and they saw each other not more than once or twice a year, she was the happiest. It was the same for him, she knew.

There were children. There had to be; he was most insistent. He was starting a new House, a new dynasty, and he needed sons. Many sons. “The Baratheons will rule over the stormlands for thousands of years to come,” he announced, proud and confident.

When the dragon king finally drew his last breath, and the new king had no more need of Orys Baratheon in King’s Landing, he came home for good to Storm’s End. To Argella. They sat across the table from each other, staring but not seeing.

“Well,” he said, finally.

 _Indeed,_ thought Argella _._

 _**__________________________** _ ****

**Cassana Estermont**

She knew him only as her father’s most fervent wish, at first. “My daughter, the wife of Steffon Baratheon, the Lord of Storm’s End and the grandson of a king.” Laughter and sniggers that Lord Estermont was aiming too high, that the Lord Paramount of the stormlands would most certainly choose a bride from a grander, richer House than the lowly Estermonts of Greenstone had no effect on her father whatsoever.

“He will see you in all your glory, Cassana, and would not be able to resist,” her father had insisted, time and time again. But it was a lie, since he had no intention for Steffon Baratheon to see Cassana as she truly was.

 _Too loud, too rude, too angry, too clever by half. Not meek enough, not courteous enough, not deferential enough_. Her faults were numerous, in her father’s eyes. “Don’t disappoint me, Cassana,” he said, when what he truly meant was, _Don’t be yourself_.

Who did Steffon Baratheon think he was marrying? The woman Cassana truly was, or the woman her father wanted her to be? She didn’t know, and she never asked. And after the marriage, she was various women all at once. With her husband. With the people who called her ‘ _my lady’_. Even with her sons, whom she loved fiercely and unconditionally.

Mask upon mask upon mask.  _“_ _But that is how you protect yourself_ _,_ _and how you protect the people you love_ _,”_  she had told the son closest in temperament to hers. But Stannis refused to heed that lesson, stubborn and unyielding even as a boy.

She thought her husband was naïve, in many ways. With bright, sunny views of the future she could not and would not share. _Someone_ had to be the one who feared the worst, who predicted danger in every corner, who prepared them for any coming catastrophe. She saw that as her duty in their marriage, to provide a counter-balance to her husband’s more easy-going disposition and his sometimes undeserved faith in the goodness of the human heart.   

 _I have loved him_. _Truly loved him_ , she thought, astonished at that realization, when the waves battering Windproud finally yanked their hands apart.

 _**__________________________** _ ****

**Selyse Florent**

They deserved each other, she had heard it whispered. Stannis Baratheon and his cold, haughty lady wife – they were as alike as two peas in a pod. But unlike her husband, her coldness was a coldness taught, not one born and bred in the bones. She was once a girl who dreamed of beautiful weddings, of blushing brides and laughing grooms. She never confided those dreams to a soul; not to her mother, not even to Cousin Delena, who had been one of her very few friends in life. They would have laughed, she expected. Ugly Selyse, sticking out like a sore thumb even among the other not-so-beautiful Florents with their large, prominent ears. Strange Selyse, charmless and loveless, glaring suspiciously at the world with hooded, mistrustful eyes.

 _He would understand_ , she thought, when she first met him. The man who looked nothing like his handsome older brother, the man completely lacking his brother’s charms and gallantry. He would know what it felt like, to be disliked, overlooked, ignored, even hated, for nothing more than the sin of being who you were. She saw them as kindred spirits, almost. Together they would teach the world that they were not to be ignored, that they would not cower or hide away in shame, that they were forces to be reckoned with.

He _did_ understand, perhaps all too well. He saw her and was reminded of himself and how the world had unfairly and unjustly treated him, and he despised her all the more for it. He ignored her all the more for it, for that unwelcome reminder. So she closed her eyes and she closed her heart and she taught herself not to care. Not to love.

 _This is how you protect yourself_. She learned that lesson the hard way. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally posted as a separate fic (The Old Gods and the New), but I’m adding it here as Chapter 2 because it’s basically a sequel.
> 
> On a personal note, I’m currently pregnant, and I feel extremely relieved not to be living in a time and place where a woman’s worth is determined by her ability to bear sons, where the following sentiment is widespread: 
> 
> “Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.” (Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel)

**Argella Durrandon**

Orys came home from King’s Landing long before the babe was due to arrive. “The king does not want me to miss the birth of my first son,” he announced proudly. “The start of a Baratheon dynasty, the most glorious House the stormlands will ever see, Aegon announced at court. My son and heir, the future Lord Paramount of the stormlands.”

 _My father was the king of the stormlands, not just a mere lord. Until you killed him._ Those words had always remained unspoken between Argella and Orys. But words did not have to be said out loud to gain their potency and power.

“What if it is not a son?” she ventured to ask him that.

“It _will_ be a son,” Orys replied, in a decisive tone that brooked no argument. “I have been praying fervently for a boy.”

Argella prayed for a girl. Her prayers went unanswered, just like Argella’s prayers for her father’s safe return from battle had been cruelly unanswered.

She did not want to touch this black-haired babe they tried to put in her arms, when she was worn and weary battling death for almost a day bringing him into this world. She did not want to love this boy who would signal the true beginning of House Baratheon, and codified the definite end of House Durrandon.

But the babe’s cries were loud and piercing. Argella’s head was pounding incessantly, and no one seemed able to make the child cease crying. So she took him in her arms. She took the babe in her arms, nursed him, and soothed him to sleep. That was her great mistake, for she could not remain indifferent to the child after that, could not keep her resolve not to love him, Baratheon or no Baratheon.

 _You are my son as well_ , she whispered softly to her son. _Not just his_.

 _You are a Durrandon too_ , she promised herself to tell her son one day, when he was old enough to listen. _Not just a Baratheon._

She had not yet decided if she would also tell her son, _Your father murdered my father_.

 _**__________________________** _ ****

**Cassana Estermont**

Cassana lit candles for the Father, praying that her child would be blessed with wisdom. She lit candles for the Warrior, praying that her child would be strong, both in mind and body.

But most fervently of all, she lit candles for the Mother, praying that her child would be a boy.

“It doesn’t matter if the babe is not a boy,” Steffon had reassured her, again and again. “We will love this child, boy _or_ girl. And there is always the next time.”

The next time would not do, Cassana knew. She had to give him a son and heir _now_. It had been almost a year since their wedding, and tongues were already wagging in the stormlands, wondering if Lord Steffon Baratheon had mistakenly married a barren woman.

“This is what comes of a foolish match,” Cassana had heard those whispers. “The Estermonts were never good enough for the Lord of Storm’s End.”

Her fervently-wished for pregnancy had stopped the rumors and whispers, but the rumor mill would soon start churning again if she gave birth to a girl, Cassana knew with certainty. So she lit more candles, and she prayed every night for a son until her water finally broke.

“It’s a boy, my lady. A plump and healthy boy,” the maester’s voice sounded almost as sweet as her son’s cries.

“Another black-haired Baratheon babe to continue the family name,” she whispered to Steffon.

Her husband was in tears. “Thank you, dearest Cassana. Thank you.”

They named the boy Robert. Robert Baratheon. As Robert grew, Cassana sometimes wondered if she should have prayed to the Father to grant wisdom to their son as often as she had prayed to the Mother that their first-born would be a boy.

 _**__________________________** _ ****

**Selyse Florent**

Selyse wrote to Stannis when Maester Cressen told her that the babe was not long in coming. “War with the Greyjoy is coming,” was her husband’s terse reply in his letter. “I cannot leave my brother’s side and desert my duty as his master of ships, not at this time.”

“I will give you the good news about our son as soon as he is born, my lord husband,” Selyse wrote him back. She had no doubt that it would be a boy. How could it be otherwise, when she had prayed to every god there was, the old gods and the new?

That old fool Cressen tried to weaken her conviction. “There is no way to know for certain, my lady. Not until the babe is born.”

“I am carrying a son! He is _inside_ me, moving around, kicking me. Don’t you think I would know whether it is a boy or a girl?”

The maester looked down quickly, but not before Selyse saw the look of pity on his face.

 _How dare you pity me?_   _Who do you think you are to pity me?_ She had never liked the maester, but her husband thought of the old man almost like a father.

The look of pity was back on Cressen’s face when he silently handed the babe to Selyse. _Black hair_ , Selyse thought, smiling. A black-haired Baratheon babe. She could not wait to write to Stannis, telling him the joyful news _._

_I have given Stannis a son. Robert and Delena are not the only ones who could make sons._

_I have given Stannis an heir. He will not be so indifferent to me now. To us, to his wife and son._

But why was Cressen looking at her with that look of pity on his face? Selyse’s gaze inspected the babe more closely, and she saw what was missing. A girl. She had given birth to a girl.

“No!” She blurted out, angry at the gods, angry at the curse Robert and Delena had put on her marriage bed, angry at her husband for not being here.

But in time, Selyse grew to love that child. A love she had never felt for anything or anyone before. When Shireen was struck with greyscale and almost died, Selyse cursed the gods even harder.

 _Why are you punishing me for praying for a son, when you never granted me that wish in the first place?_  

 _If you let my daughter live, I will never again pray for a son_ , she bargained with the old gods and the new. Shireen lived, and Selyse kept her promise. She never stopped trying for a son – never stopped working, plotting and scheming for a son, for to get her husband in bed was a most difficult undertaking – but she stopped praying to the gods for a son.

Until the day Melisandre arrived at Dragonstone with a different god. A red god who promised Selyse everything she had fervently wished for, and more. Selyse prayed and prayed, and never stopped praying. 


End file.
